Cobwebs and Jungles and Marshes, Oh, My!

Posted on17 March 2009|Comments Off on Cobwebs and Jungles and Marshes, Oh, My!

or: The Writing Life and the Art of Pushing Through

Ordinarily, I’m either writing or not writing, and when I’m writing, it takes up all my time. I feel rushed and guilty if I take time out to eat or sleep. I hear my characters all day, arguing, carrying on their lives, living out the scenes I’ve imagined for them. I can’t write it down fast enough. I’ve finished three novels, and none of the three of them took me longer than ninety days, from start to finish. My record is a 25,000-word novella in eleven days. That’s from concept to final product, edited, sanded, polished, and ready to go. Watch for it in a book called Crossroads and Other Obstacles, due in November.

Right now, though, I’m only 30,000 words into a project I started in December. That’s four months ago. That’s a lifetime, it seems like. Trudge, trudge, trudge, trudge . . .

It’s good stuff. At least, I like it, my First Reader likes it, and my second circle of readers likes it, and all of them are prodigious readers (for the record, although I’d rather satisfy readers than writers, no writers have seen any of this current project yet). But it seems to be a distant second in my life, behind more important things like playing FATE – Undiscovered Realms, or working out how to work twitter, or playing Bejeweled on my Blackberry, or going to the food court to people-watch, or walking the dog, or washing the car . . .

(note to self: future rant – readers vs writers)

By the way:

The word “pink” comes to us from the mid seventeenth century, where it was used as the name of a flower, dianthus. It is reported in some sources that the name originally referred to the serrated edge of the flower’s petals (as in “to pink,” meaning to cut a serrated edge, as on cloth), and only later referred to color. Other sources say that the name of the flower referred to its resemblance to a small, closed, pink eye, as in a person with pink eye. Now, that sounds like an attractive flower! It is also reported that the color referred to was what we would call red, now.